They get a great streaming service, MOG 2.0, to help flesh out their iTunes offerings package.

The sound quality on beats is not that bad. There is a premium paid for style and logo but all things considered the beats lineup is a big sq improvement for apple, and gets some pretty good noise canceling tech to boot.

C'mon how is this even surprising?

Apple stuff costs more because....it has the apple logo and people think their products look cool, work well enough, are easy enough to operate, most "experts" say the products are high quality and not because the performance or hardware is better/more costly.

Beats stuff costs what it does for the exact same reasons!

As far as I can see this will be a match made in heaven, greatly improving the offerings of both sides most likely.

Maybe ,but in my opinion to even be associated with the name 'Beats' devalues the brand. Surely they don't need Beats to get in to the streaming market, they have Itunes already which is quite well known.

This is coming from an old git someone who still buys CDs of course and isn't an expert (I do occasionally use Spotify and Tunein radio though)

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComradeDylie

Perfect match for apple.

They get a great streaming service, MOG 2.0, to help flesh out their iTunes offerings package.

The sound quality on beats is not that bad. There is a premium paid for style and logo but all things considered the beats lineup is a big sq improvement for apple, and gets some pretty good noise canceling tech to boot.

C'mon how is this even surprising?

Apple stuff costs more because....it has the apple logo and people think their products look cool, work well enough, are easy enough to operate, most "experts" say the products are high quality and not because the performance or hardware is better/more costly.

Beats stuff costs what it does for the exact same reasons!

As far as I can see this will be a match made in heaven, greatly improving the offerings of both sides most likely.

exactly, this is a smart move for apple they are going to get pretty stankin rich! Yea Jobs might be rolling over in his grave... but that will only be because some one's diggin it up to make room for a new wing of Apple INC lol

Not sure if anybody has said this, but the acquisition has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with Beats streaming service. i.e. the pay to download a track model is going the way of the Dodo with on demand streaming services like Spotify growing market share, Apple NEEDS to get in on the act asap.

If that's the case Tim Cooke has to get his head examined. Beats Streaming Music is a desert island, they've failed to attract many paying customers.

Not sure if anybody has said this, but the acquisition has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with Beats streaming service. i.e. the pay to download a track model is going the way of the Dodo with on demand streaming services like Spotify growing market share, Apple NEEDS to get in on the act asap.

Bull. It wasn't JUST about the service. If that were the case they could have gotten Spotify for around the same price (maybe less) and instantly become the market leader w/ 10 Mil+ paying subscribers. Instead of going that route, they bought a PROFITABLE "wearables" company, which is something Apple has intense interest in. Plus they got "Jimmy and Dre", as well as the other people at Beats music (formerly MOG) like Ian Rogers & Trent Reznor. The actual service on its own without the people is something, but it's a distant 2nd to Spotify, so it wasn't JUST about that. It was a package deal, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

As it turns out, Apple is paying slightly less than $500 million for the Beats Music streaming service, with the bulk of the money ($2.5B) going towards the purchase of Beats Electronics, which includes the company's popular line of headphones and speakers.

...

At yesterday's Code Conference, Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine revealed that the service has 250,000 subscribers in the United States, a small number compared to Spotify's 10 million worldwide listeners.

Think what you might... both Apple and Beats paid meticulous attention to the whole user experience, not just the technology inside the cases of their products.

Apple, of course, with:

Clean design with minimum buttons and tremendous ease of use;

An entire work environment (iTunes and the Apple App Store) with automatic synchronization across multiple Apple devices;

Innovative human/machine interfaces, such as Siri speech recognition, and the first wide-spread use of ultra-high-definition displays (the Retina) while increasing portability by decreasing weight and thickness.

And Beats, with:

Headphones that are both attractive and simple to use, assuring that their plugs will fit into Apple products even through iPhone cases and the like (try to fit a Sennheiser 1/8" plug into the little hole on an iPhone case to see what I mean);

Headphones that are light weight enough to stay put and comfortable to wear;

Headphones that accommodate the whole portable music scene, with attractive boxing, carrying cases, and multiple plugs.

Neither Apple nor Beats are generally where leading edge technology will first appear. But both pay far more attention to improving the entire usage experience, not just the data sheet specs, of their products.

I doubt Beats headphones had much to do with it, though it is a profitable business with high visibility. Funnily enough our local iStores don't sell any Beats products at all in their stores, I guess that will change soon.

Personally I think Apple were more after the two founders of Beats. I suspect we are going to see a move to music album and single exclusives in a battle of music eco systems (much like the console games exclusives wars), then you need high profile music industry vets to boost your profile. Also a good chance that Apple could launch their own music label and change the way the industry does business?